The Temple of the Mud God.

Archaeologists working at a site on the northeastern fringe of the Nile Delta have uncovered what they believe to be a temple to a god of mud, according to a press release issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities on their Facebook page. The site, which lies within the ancient city of Pelusium (or Blozium), a name which itself means 'mud', was first identified in 2019, when a portion of a red brick circular structure was uncovered, something which was originally identified as a possible Senate building, dating from the cities Greek or Roman period.

A section of the red brick wall surrounding the temple complex at Pelusium. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

When fully uncovered the structure proved to be a huge circular basin 35 m in diameter, with a plinth in the middle for a statue. This was connected to a system of cisterns and channels which would have carried salty, silt-laden water from the Pelusic Nile (the 'Muddy' Nile, one of the branches of the Nile Delta) into the basin, which has been interpreted as a religious centre for the God Pelusius, or Blozius, whose name meant 'mud' and who was the patron deity for the city.

The exposed temple site. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The site is thought to have been in use from the second century BC until the sixth century AD, i.e. through the Greek and Roman periods of the city, and is being compared to other temples in the Hellenic and Roman worlds rather than to other Egyptian temples.

Archaeologists working on the temple site. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The city of Pelusium was established as a port at the eastern margin of the marshes of the Nile Delta during the Egyptian Old Kingdom, but this port had silted up by the first century BC. Today, the city is several kilometres from the sea, and lies in the northwest Sinai Desert, cut off from the Nile Delta by the Suez Canal. The city was a significant border fortress to the Egyptians, and remained an important administrative centre during Roman times. It was noted for the production of flax and beer.

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Archaeologists in Israel believe they have found the first known grave of a Greek hetaira (courtesan).

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University believe that they have uncovered the first ever grave of a Greek hetaira (courtesan) in a carved limestone tomb, which was discovered beside the road between Jerusalem and Hebron in 2019. The hetairai were women who travelled with men of rank in Hellenic Greek society, and thereby gained some social standing themselves; they did not have the status of wives, who were expected to remain at home (Penelope, considered an icon of virtue in Ancient Greek society, was supposed to have faithfully waited decades for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan wars, rejecting over a hundred suitors in that time), but neither were they common prostitutes (although they did provide sexual services), typically being literate, educated, and accomplished women. The hetaira were a sufficiently important part of Hellenic society that we know the names of many of their number (such as Thais, hetaira to Alexander the Great, or Phyne, reputed to have been the richest woman in the Hellenic world). Despite this prominence, no tomb of a hetaira has ever been found.

The tomb comprised a entrance room, which it was necessary to climb down into, from which a burial chamber could be entered, although this was then sealed with large stone blocks, sealed with bitumen, and then plastered over. This was not a typical Hellenic Greek burial, however within the chamber were found charred bones (a sign of incomplete cremation, which is known among Greeks of the period), ascribed to a woman in her 20s or 30s, some iron nails, which were commonly included in burials by Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, as a ward against evil magic, and a type of folding bronze mirror, associated with high-status women in the Hellenic world.

Archaeologists opening a tomb near Jerusalem now believed to have belonged to a Greek hetaira. Shai Halevi/Israel Antiquities Authority.

It is the presence of a folding mirror that has led to the conclusion that the woman in the tomb was a hetaira. These were high-status items, only 63 such mirrors have ever been discovered, all associated with high status women. The items clearly had strong gender and status associations; Hellenic Greek men are known to have been quite capable of considerable vanity, but were never buried with mirrors, while poor women are highly unlikely to have owned such an item. The location of the tomb, by a road through a desert and far from any ancient settlement, makes it highly unlikely that the occupant was a stay-at-home Greek wife, leading the conclusion that the woman was most likely a hetaira. Exactly how she came to be buried in such a remote spot will probably never be known, but it is possible she was accompanying an officer in the army of Alexander the Great, which passed through the area during his war against Persia; Alexander was criticised during this campaign for investing more effort in burying dead hetairai than soldiers who had died fighting for him - with specific reference to burying heterai beside roads.

Folding mirror from the tomb of the hetaira. Yuli Schwartz/Israel Antiquities Authority.

Hellenic folding mirrors were often elaborately decorated both inside and out, commonly with pornographic scenes (apparently seen as suitable gifts for virtuous wives by high status men of the period). The mirror from the tomb of the hetaira is decorated on the outside with a simple pattern of concentric circles; the mirror is corroded shut making it impossible to tell if there is a design on the interior.

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Understanding the rural landscape around the ancient city of Petra.

The ancient city of Petra is rightly known for its long-distance trade connections and spectacular funerary architecture, but its inhabitants’ capacity to live in extreme environments was just as important for the city’s success. In the past two decades, archaeological surveys in Petra’s hinterlands have documented pervasive and heterogeneous landscape modifications that enabled agriculture in the semi-arid territory of southern Jordan. 

In a paper published in the journal Antiquity on 17 July 2020, Felipe Rojas of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, Sarah Newman, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Cristiano Nicosia of the Department of Cultural Heritage at the Università di Padova, and Daniel Plekhov, also of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, set out the current aims and objectives of the Petra Terraces Archaeological Project, a multidisciplinary project challenges traditional approaches to the rural landscape of Petra in order to understand its agricultural systems and the quantitative and qualitative aspects of a lived landscape.

The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project is studying the construction, repair and collapse of ancient terrace walls and dams in a single watershed north of the city. The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project aims to produce a detailed, diachronic analysis of how people in the past shaped their environment by controlling, and at times also failing to control, flows of water and sediment along that watershed. Combining archaeological, geoarchaeological, archaeobotanical, architectural and ethnographic approaches, the Petra Terraces Archaeological Project will enhance and refine scholarly understanding of Petra’s hinterlands and of human landscape interactions in and around Petra from antiquity to the present.

 

 

The ‘Petra Terraces Archaeological Project’ study area and nodes of investigation. Rojas et al. (2020).

The documentation of anthropogenic features beyond the Petra city-centre has shed light on life in the countryside over the past two and a half millennia. Rather than separating those features into discrete categories and chronologies of analysis, i.e. Nabataean terrace walls and tombs; Roman wine and Olive presses; Islamic cisterns and pools and the like, the Petra Terraces Archaeological Project approaches the watershed as an extensive, complex and variably integrated system of archaeological assemblages. These assemblages include the artefacts that have traditionally merited archaeological attention, but also the crops that were grown there; the soils and seasonal waters that walls and dams controlled; the gods to whom people prayed; and the generations of people whose experience and knowledge made that environment what it is today.

Two collections of papyri relate directly to agriculture and landholding in Nabataea. Those collections provide insight into how local rural landscapes were conceptualised at different moments in antiquity and complement archaeological data: a set of late first-century and early second-century AD private documents found near the Dead Sea, and an archive of sixth-century AD Greek documents found in one of Petra’s churches. They record information about toponymy, which specific crops were grown and the nature of plot boundaries. They demonstrate that when agricultural holdings were sold or inherited, they were understood not simply as tracts of fertile land, but precisely as complex assemblages. What was transacted included land, trees, dry wood and springs, but also irrigation ditches, areas of shade and sunlight, dung-reservoirs and even strictly timed diurnal and nocturnal watering rights.

To study the sophisticated archaeological assemblages in Petra’s northern hinterlands, the Petra Terraces Archaeological Project has identified several key nodes of the watershed where natural changes in geology and topography act in tandem with terrace walls and dams. At these nodes, potentially devastating flows of water and sediments were manipulated to retain agricultural soils, distribute water over agricultural lands and minimise the impact of seasonal flash floods. The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project’s present and future work focuses on those areas: Ras al-Silaysil, Umm Huwaiwitat, the Wadi Baqa’ and the slopes of the Shara Mountains.

 

Terrace wall a66 in Wadi Baqa’. Roja et al. (2020).

Roja et al.'s ongoing work combines methodologies and involves multiple scales of analysis. They excavate to foundations both upslope and downslope of terrace walls, document masonry and construction techniques for architectural study, and expose stratigraphic profiles of retained soils for geoarchaeological and archaeobotanical analyses. After two seasons, Roja et al.'s studies have yielded new information about ancient agricultural techniques at Petra. Micromorphological analysis of terrace fills has provided direct evidence of irrigated agriculture: silty sediments redistributed by water and tilled to produce soils suitable for growing crops. Furthermore, phytolith analysis suggests that trees, as opposed to only grasses and cereals, were grown there. Low concentrations of phytoliths of Date Palm, a type of crop attested as a major source of revenue for farmers in Nabataea in literary and archaeological sources, were found in most agricultural horizons.

 

Micromorphological thin section from terrace wall a66. Crusts show internal grading and vesicular porosity from stagnating water at soil surface; sharp crust edges indicate that crusts were broken in place by tilling. Rojas et al. (2020).

The identification of ancient agricultural horizons will enable more precise dating than has hitherto been possible for the periods during which terrace walls impeded erosion long enough to produce fine-grained agricultural soils. Previous dating of agricultural terraces at Petra used exposed profiles or sediments immediately below terrace walls. The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project will combine Optically-Stimulated Luminescence dating of samples taken from foundation levels with radiocarbon dating of humic fractions of active agricultural horizons, a method that will allow Rojas et al. to date the construction of individual terraces and provide insight into natural and anthropogenic transformations of the entire watershed. Optically-Stimulated Luminescence and radiocarbon dating are still in process. A single Optically-Stimulated Luminescence date (from 2018) from soils behind an ancient terrace in the Wadi Baqa’ has been processed thus far, providing a date of 1936 ± 154 years ago (71 BC–237 AD). That date accords with expectations from ceramic and architectural studies.

 

Hydrology model calculated using lidar-generated digital elevation model. Anthony Lauricella in Rojas et al. (2020).

The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project is also committed to multi-modal visual documentation of the landscape. Measured hand-drawn plans, sections and elevations of terrace walls, combined with photogrammetric recording, enable us to generate typologies based on morphology, on construction techniques, and on the placement of terrace walls and dams with respect to pre-existing slopes. In 2019, we tested lidar and airborne photogrammetry to produce elevation models for experimenting with hypothetical water-flows. They also employ non-measured analytical drawings to visualise the natural topography and anthropogenic changes to it. These drawings capture a combination of quantitative and qualitative aspects of the landscape. Watercolours aim to convey chromatic information and the impact of ephemeral interventions such as gardens and flowing water; free-hand maps of contours and features evoke the experience of specific clusters of interventions that are flattened in aerial views. Non-measured drawings work in tandem with the Petra Terraces Archaeological Project's standard GIS database, providing a methodological and intellectual counterweight to conventional digital ways of conceptualising, mapping and analysing ancient landscapes.

 

Watercolour of cistern and terrace system. Nick de Pace in Rojas et al. (2020).

The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project’s multidisciplinary approaches, archaeological, architectural, historical and ethnographic, demonstrate that the agricultural systems of the hinterlands of Petra, although only recently attended to by archaeologists, have key contributions to make to the study of the long-term history of environmental inequality; to the dynamics of imperialism in the region; to the interaction between local and imported agricultural practices; to changes in urban, suburban and rural experiences; and to emic understandings of the clustered features where life took place in the countryside. Our investigations challenge the exceptionalism that has sometimes informed the history of research in Petra and engage in discussion about ancient agricultural practices on a global scale.

 

Freehand map of watershed and associated archaeological features (terrace walls in red). Rojas et al. (2020).

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